Cahn-Hilliard phase-field modeling of tumor growth via locally adaptive isogeometric analysis with THB-splines

Abstract

Predicting tumor dynamics in biological systems under physiologically relevant conditions using mathematical and computational models remains a challenging problem. Continuum models based on phase-field (diffuse-interface) formulations have proven to be an effective modeling strategy to govern tumor dynamics and interactions of multiple species. Within this framework, the present work investigates a tumor growth model based on the Cahn-Hilliard (CH) equation. The formulation involves a fourth-order differential operator that imposes higher continuity requirement on approximation spaces for a well-defined primal variational formulation. To address this challenge, we use isogeometric analysis (IGA), which inherently satisfies this requirement through spline-based basis functions and eliminates the need for mixed or auxiliary-variable approaches commonly used in standard finite element discretizations. Additionally, a locally adaptive IGA scheme with truncated hierarchical B-splines (THB-splines) is used to reduce computational cost while maintaining accuracy. The model is first evaluated on standard benchmark cases and then applied to an organ-scale, patient-specific geometric model of the breast reconstructed from magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. Our results show that the model reproduces known tumor morphologies, ranging from a spheroidal pattern to fingered growth. A series of numerical experiments further shows the diversity of tumor dynamics produced by different model parameter choices. Our findings demonstrate the predictive potential of the CH-based phase-field tumor growth model integrated with a locally adaptive IGA framework.